Village Offers Rare Look At A Different New Jersey

July 14, 1985|By George Anastasia, KNT News Service

STANHOPE, N.J. — A burly blacksmith, a bright red bandana wrapped around his head, a broad leather apron covering his chest, pounds a glowing piece of iron into the shape of a horseshoe, explaining that the trick is to make sure the iron is hot enough to bend, but not soft enough to mold.

In a barn across the village green, two women in bright floor-length dresses sit behind looms and pedal away as strands of colored wool magically intertwine. Around them hang the fruits of their labor, woven blankets, rugs, vests and dresses.

Outdoors there's the lyrical sound of a flute coming from just beyond a little knoll and the bleating of sheep from behind the barn. Off in the distance, someone is strumming a guitar and picking at a fiddle.

This is Waterloo Village, a national historic site in Allamuchy State Park, tucked into New Jersey's northwest corner. Waterloo is a working historic village, complete with houses, shops and barns and a group of artisans dressed in the attire of early settlers. It's all designed to take you back 200 years, when life was slower and time was spent doing instead of watching and making instead of buying.

''It's a walk back in time,'' said Eugenia Pagano of the non-profit Waterloo Foundation for the Arts, the organization that, since the early 1950s, has directed the restoration of the village.

''It's a restored village, not a reconstructed village. Everything was rebuilt on its original foundations. We go from the colonial times through the federal period to the Victorian era.''

Every year about 150,000 visitors come to the village, which features craft and antique exhibits in the spring and a summer-long music festival. But the prize attraction is the village itself, sitting beside Waterloo Lake, the Musconetcong River and the Morris Canal on 1,100 largely unspoiled acres in a pristine area of New Jersey unfamiliar to many tourists who think of the state only in terms of the shore, casinos and race tracks. Waterloo Village offers a glimpse into another part of the state. It's a living portrait of New Jersey's history, an image that often seems overlooked in the ''New Jersey and You'' tourist promotion the state is grinding out.

The ''walk back in time'' begins once you pull your car off the two- lane asphalt road that leads from Route 206 into Allamuchy State Park and set out on foot for the village.

There you'll find a mix of architecture and characters blending together to tell the story of the village's past.

The first homesteaders are said to have arrived in the area in the 1740s, and in their wake came merchants, miners and adventurers seeking to cash in on the water power, timber and ore in the Allamuchy Mountains to the north. By 1760, a four-fire, two-hammer forge, grist and saw mill formed the foundation upon which the village grew.

The forge became the major source of armaments for the colonial army during the Revolutionary War and the industrial magnet for the development of the village.

By the 1800s, the Waterloo Foundry and the Morris Canal, which ran through the village on its 102-mile course from Phillipsburg to Jersey City, had brought a boom time to the area and turned the village ''into a bustling inland port,'' according to a thumbnail historical sketch provided by the Waterloo Foundation.

Later in the century a train depot and the Mountain Ice Co., which operated a 30,000-ton commercial icehouse on the lake, kept industry and commerce alive and the village growing.

It is against that historic backdrop that the village has been painstakingly restored and its artisans set to work.

There are 18 buildings open to the public in the village, along with several private residences. Three other structures -- a Victorian home, a library and the original forge -- are being restored.